I don't disagree with your advice to avoid ranking crit, but the reasoning you provide for it contains a lot of false statements.
Quote from TA;436852:
Like I said, I'm done talking about Critical Hit. And my "source" for this, is it happening to me in-game. The one who made us initially aware of the game mechanic is irrelevant. It's my opinion at this point.
I'll try to avoid discussing opinions in this post, but you're misrepresenting several facts.
Quote from TA;436852:
Oh and by the way, I don't know in what world something that [noparse]"hinder[s] you by a few seconds"[/noparse] isn't "really bad." But in my little world, it is. Why have a large chance to be hindered when you could just, oh I don't know... not rank it?
Quote from TA;436852:
If you rank it, you:
1) Could miss out on most of your damage.
2) Could miss out on all of your damage.
3) Possibly do an insignificant abysmally low amount of physical damage with crit.
4) Maybe knock something down.* See 1 & 2. This will use a large amount of stamina and yield no damage whatsoever
You seem to be ignoring the fact that knockdown is a mechanic of the game, not just of the Crit skill, which barely affects knockdown at all.
For LLR, you would lose most of your damage if the magical part misses, but the difference between it's physical and magical ranges is greater than knockback distance, so missing the magical part because of knockdown is nearly impossible.
The "downswing" of the smash is like around 20% to 40% of the total damage of the combo (depending on your proportions of MATT and ATT, and how many of the Ls landed). For the Label/Thread combos, it's not most, or even half of your damage unless you're ignoring the snap, which would be odd since preparing a snap is usually the reason you do an LLLR/LLLLR, and missing the last part of the smash won't make you miss your pull/snap. If you miss the pull, that means you either didn't touch anything with the smash at all, you failed to press E at the right time, or the target was already taken out. It often may look like you failed a pull after a successful smash if your char and/or the target(s) were not where they seemed to be because of lag, or if the target was knocked back by one of the normals instead of the first hit of the smash.
Also, no mater how you spin it, a crit can't make you miss
all of your damage; You have to hit something to get the crit in the first place.
Quote from TA;436852:
5) Invest a massive amount of AP.
Well, the actual AP cost isn't really "massive", just way more than the skill is worth to an Evie.
Quote from TA;436852:
You're trading damage for a chance to knockdown. Bottom line is, if you prefer crowd control, you might be a fan of it. If you prefer raw dps, or reliability, you probably won't be a fan of it.
Not really. You gain damage when you rank Crit. The damage increase from physical Crit may be small, but not nearly as small as the increased knockdown chance, so on average, you're gaining more dmg than you're losing. If you're sacrificing anything when you rank Crit (other than AP), it's mob control(depending on how you prefer to control them).
You're trading slightly lower chance of knockdown for slightly higher damage and knockdown chance
Quote from TA;436852:
If you don't rank it, you:
1) Don't have any significant chance to miss any of your attacks.
You don't have any significant chance of missing any of your attacks with maxed Crit either.
Quote from TA;436852:
2) Will have a slightly lower chance of knocking things down, but always deal damage from the skills you intended to use.
3) Will have better control over your character and know what your character is going to do when you use its skills, not playing a lottery that could screw you over just as well as help you.
Nope. You wouldn't always deal damage from the skills you intend to use unless you have no knockdown chance at all, and staying away from Crit won't make that happen.
If you could make knockdown either impossible or guaranteed, then you would have better control, but since you can only make slight adjustments to your odds, the only way to improve your control is yo understand that you're "playing a lottery" no matter what and just stay prepared for either outcome.
Anyway, I'm not suggesting that you your guide recommend the skill, I'm just saying that you should prune some of the misleading statements about why.